Series Award Edition XI — 1st Prize:
FRANCISCO GONZALEZ CAMACHO
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YOU CAN’T ENTER THE SAME RIVER TWICE
PHOTOGRAPHY : FRANCISCO GONZALEZ CAMACHO
EDITORIAL : LIFE FRAMER, PICTURA GALLERY & FRANCISCO GONZALEZ CAMACHO
Nothing holds. Nothing stays. Growth and ruin intertwine, a pulse of becoming and unravelling, between absence and presence, the landscape is in flux.
We’re delighted to announce Francisco Gonzalez Camacho as the winner of our Edition XI Series Award with his series You Can’t Enter the Same River Twice, judged by Lisa Woodward and Mia Dalglish, co-curators at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.
Francisco Gonzalez Camacho noticed a crack in the pavement and felt a pull towards it. Others might have just moved on, but he stopped to align his shadow so that the line fractured his silhouette. The resulting image speaks to the feeling of being internally divided, in a way that most conventional photographs can’t do. Camacho moves through nature and his daily environment with a kind of x-ray vision to a spiritual or emotional realm not always seen by the naked eye.
Camacho’s observations are brought to life in small, meticulously crafted prints. He approaches the role of the photographic printer as an alchemist, leaning into the magical qualities of the medium with experimentation and precision. Employing processes like infrared, inversion, and photopolymer etching, he shifts the image to reveal what may exist beyond the surface of things.
Through Camacho’s vision, the natural world is a gate that opens into the realm of the unconscious. In his series, You can’t enter the same river twice, Camacho wanders through the Finnish landscape to process the death of his father. He encounters offerings from the land that speak to him about impermanence and transformation, like two trees, severely bent but still standing. In them, he sees something that breaks and dies but goes back to life and is reborn.
Camacho’s photographs hint at something many people feel but can’t name- an ineffable, existential mystery beneath the surface of things. He circles around the mystery with a cohesive and sophisticated visual language that feels uniquely his own. Using old processes, he makes very new and nontraditional landscapes; there is magic in the combination of these ingredients: the old and the new, the poetic and the precise. His photographs bear a sense of slow time, and a conviction that the world is imbued with meaning.
This series explores the concept of impermanence, the futility of becoming and the landscape as an agent of transformation.
An unknowable rhythm unfolds, forms bend, break, emerge, dissolve, neither whole nor undone. Traces persist within the drift, shifting patterns, unfixed entities, hidden layers of impermanence lie beneath.
Nothing holds. Nothing stays. Growth and ruin intertwine, a pulse of becoming and unravelling, between absence and presence, the landscape is in flux. The surface fractures, shifts, unseen forces, all caught in the current, fleeting, surrendering to the flow–panta rhei.
These ideas are rooted in the work of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which I conceptually approach through the landscape, using photographic metaphors to express and process the recent passing of a family member. They explore the inevitability of death as an integral part of the process of becoming.
– Francisco Gonzalez Camacho
Using old processes, he makes very new and non-traditional landscapes; there is magic in the combination of these ingredients: the old and the new, the poetic and the precise. His photographs bear a sense of slow time, and a conviction that the world is imbued with meaning.
The presiding jury
